Date: 11/1/26 9:25 am From: Bruce Rideout via SanDiegoRegionBirding <bnkrideout...> Subject: [SanDiegoRegionBirding] Documenting the irruption
Now that we are in the midst of a spectacular irruption year for species like Red Crossbill and Evening Grosbeak, people are beginning to report them down to the level of call type, but often without recordings. Although the expected Red Crossbill here is type 2, we shouldn't assume that all of them will be, which means it's very important that people document their observations with recordings.
Most people describe the type 2 calls as something like "Kip Kip", so when they hear a call like that they naturally assume they have type 2 Red Crossbills. Most of the time that will be correct, but I would encourage you to compare the type 2 calls to types 3 and 4 in your Merlin app, or at the Peterson Field guide to bird sounds website, and ask yourself whether you could really distinguish between a type 2 and a type 3 when they are flying overhead, especially in our noisy environments in San Diego. The best way to distinguish them is by the appearance of the call notes in the spectrogram of a recording, which is why we would like people to submit recordings if they are submitting a record at the level of call type.
If you have a recording that you think has calls from either of these species, but it's very noisy and the calls are faint, you can email the recording to me and I can try cleaning it up and sending it back. I highly recommend a standalone recording app that records in wav format, such as the free Song Meter app. Another advantage of Song Meter is that it has a three second pre-record buffer, which means that when you press the record button it already has captured the previous three seconds of audio. Merlin also works, but the microphone sensitivity will be a bit lower with Merlin. And at the risk of stating the obvious, you should stop walking and talking when you are trying to capture a recording.
Let's not miss this opportunity to get good documentation of this irruption year.
Bruce Rideout
La Mesa
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